Upside Down

by Jaym Gates

  She wheels around to glare at Mesoth. They speak no common language; he is too small for Her to see his smallhands gesticulating, and She knows no one would have bothered to teach a male how to write. She has daubed him in the complex language of Her scent, an ephemeral grammar he lacks the odor-hairs to comprehend.

  Instinct tells him the action means this: I want you. Yet he wishes he could speak the air as She does, comprehend the complex emotions conveyed by short-chain carbons and amines and hydroxycitronellae, so he could understand what about him she finds desirable.

  She lowers herself to his level, descending from great heights, to nudge him. This gesture, he knows from long experience: do you have enough of my scent to find me? And yes, slathered in Her, even his substandard odor-hairs could track Her lair anywhere in the city. It is an invitation to stop by after work hours.

  To court one of the most fecund females in the land.

  He manages a weak nod through the drugged rapture of his shallow wounds. She bumps him affectionately, then scuttles up the mountainside to give orders to her son, the weatherman.

  And when She has vanished from sight, they flock to him. The younger ones trace the outlines of his wounds, as if touching the injuries inflicted by a female might teach them some great secret. The older ones press their legs up against Mesoth’s chitin, impregnating themselves with Her pheromones before slackening in gratitude: they thought they’d never scent a woman again.

  You did it, they say. Except Mesoth doesn’t know what he did. She chose him, and he never knows why.

  This time. This time, he will go all the way.

  #

  Every night, after work, Mesoth eats a banquet and is eaten.

  Her birthing chamber is a vast tapestry of elaborately-knotted webs, providing tiny footholds for clumsy newspawn. The knots are all spinnerette-white, freshly extruded; She must have many talented servants who clear away the dusty webs and weave new ones every morning.

  There are great heaps of violet leaves for him to eat. She waits next to them, flexing Her odor-hairs anxiously. She makes space for him to sit beside Her — a mark of respect so great, his legs weaken.

  He does not know what the leaves are, and has no way to ask. He might not even have a word to describe them: females have expanded responsibilities and expanded vocabularies. The sap oozing from the cut stems is sharp and piney.

  Still, the room is wreathed in perfume — Her whispered reassurances to him in a language he cannot understand.

  She reaches over with her smallest limb to push the leaves towards him.

  Eat them, that shy gesture says, so I may fall in love with you.

  Mesoth tucks into them. His natural odor is alluring, but not alluring enough: She is trying to help him, changing his chemistry to trigger Her lusts. She wants to want him, and doubtlessly She has paid greatly for these exotic herbs.

  It is an honor. A brutal honor, as the leaves swell in his stomach and the drugs pulse through his lymphomatic systems.

  She strokes his back as he convulses. Her touch is intended to comfort him, but Mesoth worries her caresses will wipe off his makeup. If She saw the marks from all the females who’d courted him before, She’d be revolted at how hard-used his body is …

  She gathers him up tenderly to take little bites of him. She trembles with elation as She nips tiny segments out, snuffling his body as though searching for the treasure within him.

  His flesh is made exquisite by her attention; he never feels more alive than when he is in his lover’s jaws, his impending death filling him with appreciation for the beauty She has provided.

  He angles his body so She will not eat the hard knots of scars left by past lovers. He soars high on endorphins: She bites harder, deeper. Her stinger pokes out of its sheath, ready to impregnate him…

  She collapses to the ground. He tumbles from her slackened jaws.

  Is She embarrassed? Angry? Self-reproaching? He cannot tell. He would have had to be around enough females to read their body language. And what female would be with a male without a mating instinct to pull them together?

  He inches towards her, thoughts muddled by the herbs, gently tapping her tarsus: should I return?

  She sweeps her scent-gland across him: yes. Return. Her touch lights a new hope within him: when he returns tomorrow, she will have new remedies to solve the puzzle of his foul flesh.

  They are united as one: him needing Her, Her needing him. Together they will forge a path to love.

  And he is still filled with hope the next morning, when he arrives at work to discover another three males have sailed off to their deaths in the night.

  The weatherman shrugs.

  They died because of you, Mesoth says, raising his arms high so all the workers may see him speak. Before we work again, you will get proper equipment to sense the changes in the wind.

  The weatherman cringes, reluctant to face down an incubated. The request will take many days -

  Then the bridge will wait days! Mesoth waves. Not another strand will be spun until these males are safe! Do you think their fathers sacrificed themselves so they could die to chance?

  The workers chase the weatherman out onto a thin ledge. The weatherman makes high-pitched keening noises, promising to send soldiers in to quell this rebellion, knowing it will be of no use: who would resist a beloved male in his last days?

  To be a male in love, to have the end so dizzyingly in sight, is strength. Mesoth would have feared for his job before; now, he is intoxicated by death’s proximity. He is already sacrificing himself for great causes; why not greater ones?

  No great change ever came about but for a father’s love, the saying goes. And as the weatherman pleads weakly that he can’t get the equipment in, making concession after concession as the males riot, Mesoth understands the power of passion.

  #

  After weeks of experiments, Mesoth enters the chamber to see Her standing next to a pile of violet leaves.

  His heart slows. Still, he shambles towards the leaves, shovels them into his mouth, hoping against hope.

  The violet leaves are, at least, comparatively good to eat. Over the last few weeks, She has brought him increasingly pestilential concoctions: a crusty white bark that made his hairs fall out, acidic seeds that pockmarked his fangs, black mushrooms so vile that Mesoth coughed dark spores for weeks afterwards. He crawled to work, belly scraping the ground, keeping his job only by Her forbearance and the natural deference to sickly fathers.

  And now, back to the first herbs.

  He crunches the leaves down. Except when he convulses this time, She palpates him in confusion, searching him for answers.

  Why is he so unworthy?

  She heaves him off the ground, taking larger bites than ever before, the air pungent with Her frustration. Before, her bites were precise wounds, weaving her way delicately around his anatomy. Each puncture felt like a strand placed in a web, an elegant rising towards mortal injury.

  These injuries feel random, angry, a murder instead of a pregnancy.

  He struggles in Her grasp for the first time; She tears into him, hoping to find something delicious deeper inside him, some small place to lay Her eggs …

  Finally, the air stinking of rage, She sinks Her fangs deep into his cephalothorax. She bites deep into his shoulder’s root, tearing his left bigleg free — not a clean disseveration, but a ragged chunk, the way you’d eat prey.

  Mesoth flails his smallarms. I’m being devoured, he thinks, horrified, not loved. He grapples at her maw, his reflexes jangled by his missing leg, his hemocyanin spilling out of the wound into sickly green puddles on the floor. She rips his midleft leg out …

  Then flings him into the knotted web, collapsing in frustration.

  Mesoth spasms as the wounds pucker, an amputation so deep the legs will never grow back. She champs her jaws on his severed legs — my legs are over there, he thinks, not attached to me — before crunching them into fragments.

  Despite
his maimed body, Mesoth tumbles out of the web. He no longer knows how to walk, with only six legs; his gait is a clumsy thing, smashing his jaw into the floor as he stutter-limps over to Her.

  He feels sorrow for Her, for himself, for them. They wanted to make something grand. But he wasn’t what She needed, and She had given him every last chance: even those final dismemberments had been Her last attempt to find the goodness within him.

  She has changed color, so saddened her shell has turned a mourner’s white.

  He taps her tarsus.

  She flicks her underhairs at him, filling the air with poison. Get out. Even that is a kindness: She could consume him in Her rage, no one would blame Her, Mesoth had wasted Her time with his polluted, eggless flesh.

  And neither of them know why this didn’t work.

  Mesoth hobbles off, leaving hope behind.

  #

  Getting to work the next day is a labor in itself: climbing the mountain is near-impossible with fewer limbs, and more than once he reaches out with a phantom limb. He slides back, hanging unceremoniously from three legs.

  The other workers climb past him, pretending he doesn’t exist.

  As he struggles onto the mountaintop, the weatherman is assembling the newest devices brought in: windsocks, glass tubes filled with air pressure-sensitive fluids, brass telescopes to view the horizon.

  Such expensive equipment, the weatherman says. I’ve been asked to find other ways to cut costs.

  He trains his many eyes on the gaps between Mesoth’s legs, his hairs rippling with pleasure. Mesoth begins to protest that he could teach the new workers how to set strong anchor-webs — but he is no longer a Father. He is a meek male who hopes to get a kind reference, and so he slinks home.

  #

  He almost has the hang of walking again by the time he climbs home.

  Things aren’t so bad, he thinks. His rent is paid up through the season. He’s not so crippled yet that he needs to work at the chemical plant. And if the weatherman gives him a good reference – what male would blame a father for an exuberance of caring? — then he can probably get a job stringing prey-webs. With luck, he might even afford some prostheses — fake legs would never fool a male, but the females, well, they don’t look much beyond the abdomen.

  He settles into his wall’s rough weave, stumps aching. At least he has his scent. Males with better-developed odor-hairs than he have told him his scent is alluring, he’ll find a mate someday.

  Speaking of scent …

  He gulps down a packet of molting-herbs to help his broken shell loosen. His exoskeleton is too suffused with Her scent. He carefully plucks off the shattered portions She bit through, his remaining legs hitching painfully around Her wounds …

  He piles the jagged chunks of chitin next to the other shells he has molted to move on, each saturated with the exotic aromas of all those who had loved and left him. There’s the adolescence-soft shell he wore when he met the golden weaver who drew his first blood. The sleek shell he wore for the sequined mirror-mate who glittered so beautifully at dawn. The punctured shell from the tufted recluse who had leapt at him out from her lair, dragging him back to a whirlwind romance.

  And now, placed carefully next to the rest, the jagged chunks from the immense socialite.

  He shuffles the shells around with his remaining frontleg, stirring up miasmas of memory. He doesn’t know why they left him, and they always leave scars.

  He wonders whether he’ll ever be enough for someone.

  So much to do. He needs to see a physic, to see if the herbs She gave him has done long-term damage. He’ll have to hunt for jobs, to figure out what swirls of makeup will cover his new wounds, to practice new weaving techniques to compensate for his lost limbs …

  The television screen glows with yet another romantic comedy — and though he intends to practice weaving, Mesoth instead tucks his legs underneath himself and watches.

  Somewhere, there’s a female who wants him for who he is.

  Somewhere, there’s a connection so powerful it transcends language.

  Somewhere, there’s a love that sweeps aside all excuses, a romance so certain there’s no need for courtship, just a life-long bond that gives both partners perfect meaning.

  Mesoth watches the romances, his breath shallow, hoping against hope that one day he too will find perfect love.

  Hamsa, Hamsa, Hams, Tfu, Tfu, Tfu

  Alisa Schriebman

  “Sim, papai.” Yes, Dad. Gabriela Costa Barros waved to the server ten chairs down the white sand beach from her and mimed signing her check. “Vou chamá-lo quando eu chegar lá.” I’ll call you when I get there. If she hurried, she’d just make the 11:41 flight.

  So much for her sun-and-Metaxa-soaked compassionate leave.

  #

  The sun rose at the excruciating hour of 5:21am, Adana local time. Four hours, seventeen minutes, and 370.9 km later, Gabi exited the “taxi” she’d commandeered at the entrance to the excavation site at Göbekli Tepe.

  Impatient with a raki-induced hangover, Gabi stopped the official guarding it with an upraised palm before he could say anything that would piss her off.

  His eyebrows pinched tightly over the long hook of his nose.

  She brandished her badge and then shoved it across the space between them.

  Seeing the official hamsa that all signatory nations to the Treaty of Gehenna Basin recognized, he sighed. “Good morning, Agent Costa Barros. To what do we owe the pleasure of your visit?” he asked in English of an indeterminate origin.

  Aside from the fact he’d obviously been watching American spy movies, it wasn’t a bad choice. Even though they required operatives to speak at least one Middle Eastern language, the Department of Supernatural Operations conducted its official business in English.

  Rather than playing guessing games with complexion and surnames, Gabi replied, “Demons,” in kind, in the heavily accented, sixth, and least fluent of her working tongues. “There was a report?” Never mind that it wasn’t an official report.

  “If you will just wait —”

  “Think about that a second.”

  A worried frown creased his entire face — there you go — and he handed her back her badge. Nervous now, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Will you require —”

  “I’ll be safer without, thanks.” An escort would only complicate matters.

  #

  Curiosity got the better of Gabi while she wandered the stone rabbit warrens of the Neolithic site. What kind of people had lived here? Had they looked like the site-workers dressed in various shades of beige rags with their black hair and dark eyes?

  A football bounced from an embankment into Gabi’s path. At a wave of tittering laughter, she glanced up at the band of dust-caked children. A woman stood from a trench where she’d been sifting dirt. While reversing the bow in her back to stretch, she scolded them.

  “La bas,” Gabi replied in Arabic. It’s fine. With a smile, she drop-kicked the ball back to the children.

  Leave it to Amélia Graça da Costa to populate her dig-team with Syrian refugees. If she knew her father, whatever pests her grandmother had wanted her help with didn’t worry him near as much as the refugees.

  He worried too much. At nearly eighty, her grandmother scared soldiers to a stand-still with a single, withering glance. Yet, as the sun rose higher and sweat collected in uncomfortable, hard-to-wipe places, Avó’s unfairly unlined face was no more in evidence than blue-eyed blondes.

  She hadn’t wanted to call attention to herself or Avó, but after a half an hour more of not finding her, Gabi broke down and asked a sketchpad-laden postdoc if he’d seen Dr. Da Costa.

  “Try her tent,” she was informed and given no chance to inquire further before he hurried away.

  Since when did Dr. Amélia Graça da Costa rest in her tent while others labored?

  #

  “¿Avó?” Gabi called quietly from the courtyard of the beige-on-beige Tent City t
hat served as basecamp for her grandmother’s excavation. “¿Onde está?” Where are you?

  No one answered, and the hair stood up on the back of Gabi’s neck. “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty …” she began. The 91st Psalm offered protection against the mazzikim most likely to be in a barren place like this if the “pests” were supernatural.

  “¿Avó? It’s not funny now. Papai said you needed my help.”

  A tent flap moved aside to let out her grandmother’s voice, her native Portuguese long since weathered soft by the pronunciations of a dozen different towns: “Gabriela Lúcia Costa Barros, is that fear in your voice?”

  Gabi let out a breath of relief and then scoffed. “As if. Now, what are you doing in your-”

  Her grandmother emerged, the long, barely-silvered braid pulled over her shoulder doing a poor job of hiding an arm in a sling. Her sun-darkened skin did even less to hide the vertical split and yellowing bruise on her cheekbone or the still-shiny black eye above it.

  “¡Avó!” Gabi dropped her bag and sprang forward like a gazelle; her heart pounded like a young rabbit. “What the hell happened?”

  “Gehenna, meu bem.”

  “Seriously? You’re going to argue semantics at a time like-”

  But her grandmother was shaking her head.

  “Oh. You actually mean that.” Carefully, Gabi embraced her grandmother. “Papai said… but he didn’t want me to call DSO to send in a team, so I thought —”

  Her grandmother smoothed a hand against Gabi’s cheek, bruised eyes soft with sorrow. “Sim. I’m sorry about Piotr, carinho. I liked the boy.”